British colonists in 1830s India lived in terror of the Thugs. Reputed to be brutal criminals, the Thugs supposedly strangled, beheaded, and robbed thousands of travelers in the goddess Kali's name. The British responded with equally brutal repression of the Thugs and developed a compulsive fascination with tales of their monstrous deeds.

Did the Thugs really exist, or did the British invent them as an excuse to seize tighter control of India? Drawing on historical and anthropological accounts, Indian tales and sacred texts, and detailed analyses of the secret Thug language, Martine van Woerkens reveals for the first time the real story of the Thugs. Many different groups of Thugs actually did exist over the centuries, but the monsters the British made of them had much more to do with colonial imaginings of India than with the real Thugs. Tracing these imaginings down to the present, van Woerkens reveals the ongoing roles of the Thugs in fiction and film from Frankenstein to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

List of IllustrationsTranslator's AcknowledgmentsAcknowledgmentsNote on TranscriptionIntroductionPart I. British India and Crime: The Thugs between Myth and Reality1. Colonizers and Bandits2. The Anti-Thug Campaign3. Who Were the Thugs?Part II. The Colonizers between Science and the Imaginary4. William Sleeman and Meadows Taylor: Parallel Biographies5. William Sleeman and Thug Science6. Meadows Taylor's Imaginary Discourse7. Later Thug AdventuresConclusionThug Lexicon or RamaseeNotesReferencesIndex

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